Julian Lage

Julian Lage’s vivid, wondrously textured new album Speak To Me offers a series of dispatches from his ongoing search for narrative beyond words. Intimate in tone and capacious in intention, the album represents some of the most ambitious music Lage has documented to date. Its originals travel a wide range of American music, and delight in the deliberate crossing of wires between gospel hymn and rural blues, California singer-songwriter sunshine and skronky jazz.

One piece evokes the motion of a river (“Nothing Happens Here”), another finds Lage bringing visceral free-jazz abandon to a tricky corkscrew of a surf-rock theme (“Speak To Me”). The songs may diverge from the orderly verse/chorus exposition of pop, but their melodies are earworms nonetheless. Each is laced with emotional undercurrents of hope, restlessness, doubt; a few of them, like the pensive “Omission” and incredibly slow “Serenade,” are notable for dramatic human pauses. Other tunes slide around, taking sudden fishtail turns.

Speak To Me showcases the guitarist and composer in a variety of settings, including solo acoustic, duo, his accustomed trio with bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Dave King, and a larger ensemble with keyboards (from Kris Davis and Patrick Warren) and woodwinds (Levon Henry). It’s Lage’s fourth effort for Blue Note, and it’s part of a torrent of creative activity that includes his participation in Charles Lloyd’s Trio of Trios project and records with Terri Lynn Carrington, John Zorn, and Cautious Clay.

Speak To Me was produced by Joe Henry, the singer, songwriter, and producer responsible for landmark albums by Solomon Burke, Allen Toussaint, and many others. When Henry heard Lage’s songs in rough form – many as voice memos from his phone – he says he was immediately captivated by the challenge of the project: “For me it became ‘How can we make a record where Julian is improvising throughout, as is his gift, while we’re also attending to the song?’ Everything had to exist in service to the song form.”